THOSE YELLOW PINE BOXES
It was late in the short afternoon, and getting close on to twilight,
when we got back into the town. Except for the soldiers there was
little life stirring in the twisting streets. There was a funeral or so
in progress. It seemed to us that always, no matter where we stopped,
in whatsoever town or at whatsoever hour, some dead soldier was being
put away. Still, I suppose we shouldn't have felt any surprise at that.
By now half of Europe was one great funeral. Part of it was on crutches
and part of it was in the graveyard and the rest of it was in the field.
Daily in these towns back behind the firing lines a certain percentage
of the invalided and the injured, who had been brought thus far before
their condition became actually serious, would die; and twice daily, or
oftener, the dead would be buried with military honors. So naturally
we were eyewitnesses to a great many of these funerals. Somehow they
impressed me more than the sight of dead men being hurriedly shoveled
under ground on the battle front where they had fallen. Perhaps it was
the consciousness that those who had these formal, separate burials
were men who came alive out of the fighting, and who, even after being
stricken, had a chance for life and then lost it. Perhaps it was the
small show of ceremony and ritual which marked each one--the firing
squad, the clergyman in his robes, the tramping escort--that left so
enduring an impress upon my mind. I did not try to analyze the reasons;
but I know my companions felt as I did.
I remember quite distinctly the very first of these funerals that I
witnessed. Possibly I remember it with such distinctness because it
was the first. On our way to the advance positions of the Germans we
had come as far as Chimay, which is an old Belgian town just over the
frontier from France. I was sitting on a bench just outside the doorway
of a parochial school conducted by nuns, which had been taken over
by the conquerors and converted into a temporary receiving hospital
for men who were too seriously wounded to stand the journey up into
Germany. All the surgeons on duty here were Germans, but the nursing
force was about equally divided between nuns and Lutheran deaconesses
who had been brought overland for this duty. Also there were several
volunteer nurses--the wife of an officer, a wealthy widow from
Düsseldorf and a school-teacher from Coblenz among them. Catholic and
Protestant, Belgian and French and German, they all labored together,
cheerfully and earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most
unpleasant sorts.
One of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager
_ex officio_, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard
and a slightly wounded major for an escort. She was starting on a
three-hundred-mile automobile run through a half subdued and dangerous
country, meaning to visit base hospitals along the German frontier
until she found a supply of anti-tetanus serum. Lockjaw, developing
from seemingly trivial wounds in foot or hand, had already killed six
men at Chimay within a week. Four more were dying of the same disease.
So, since no able-bodied men could be spared from the overworked staffs
of the lazarets, she was going for a stock of the serum which might
save still other victims. She meant to travel day and night, and if
a bullet didn't stop her and if the automobile didn't go through a
temporary bridge she would be back, she thought, within forty-eight
hours. She had already made several trips of the sort upon similar
missions. Once her car had been fired at and once it had been wrecked,
but she was going again. She was from near Cologne, the wife of a rich
manufacturer now serving as a captain of reserves. She hadn't heard
from him in four weeks. She didn't know whether he still lived. She
hoped he lived, she told us with simple fortitude, but of course these
times one never knew.
It was just before sundown. The nuns had gone upstairs to their little
chapel for evening services. Through an open window of the chapel just
above my head their voices, as they chanted the responses between the
sonorous Latin phrases of the priest who had come to lead them in their
devotions, floated out in clear sweet snatches, like the songs of
vesper sparrows. Behind me, in a paved courtyard, were perhaps twenty
wounded men lying on cots. They had been brought out of the building
and put in the sunshine. They were on the way to recovery; at least
most of them were. I sat facing a triangular-shaped square, which was
flanked on one of its faces by a row of shuttered private houses and
on another by the principal church of the town, a fifteenth-century
structure with outdoor shrines snuggled up under its eaves. Except
for the chanting of the nuns and the braggadocio booming of a big
cock-pigeon, which had flown down from the church tower to forage for
spilt grain almost under my feet, the place was quiet. It was so quiet
that when a little column of men turned into the head of the street
which wound past the front of the church and off to the left, I heard
the measured tramping of their feet upon the stony roadway fully a
minute before they came in sight. I was wondering what that rhythmic
thumping meant, when one of the nursing sisters came and closed the
high wooden door at my back, shutting off the view of the wounded men.
There appeared a little procession, headed by a priest in his robes
and two altar-boys. At the heels of these three were six soldiers
bearing upon their shoulders a wooden box painted a glaring yellow;
and so narrow was the box and so shallow-looking, that on the instant
the thought came to me that the poor clay inclosed therein must feel
cramped in such scant quarters. Upon the top of the box, at its widest,
highest point, rested a wreath of red flowers, a clumsy, spraddly
wreath from which the red blossoms threatened to shake loose. Even at a
distance of some rods I could tell that a man's inexpert fingers must
have fashioned it.
Upon the shoulders of the bearers the box swayed and jolted.
Following it came, first, three uniformed officers, two German nurses
and two surgeons from another hospital, as I subsequently learned; and
following them half a company of soldiers bearing their rifles and
wearing side arms. As the small cortège reached a point opposite us an
officer snapped an order and everybody halted, and the gun-butts of
the company came down with a smashing abruptness upon the cobbles. At
that moment two or three roughly clad civilians issued from a doorway
near by. Being Belgians they had small cause to love the Germans, but
they stopped in their tracks and pulled off their caps. To pay the
tribute of a bared head to the dead, even to the unknown dead, is in
these Catholic countries of Europe as much a part of a man's rule of
conduct as his religion is.
The priest who led the line turned my way inquiringly. He did not have
to wait long for what was to come, nor did I. Another gate farther
along in the nunnery wall opened and out came six more soldiers,
bearing another of these narrow-shouldered coffins, and accompanied by
a couple of nurses, an officer and an assistant surgeon. At sight of
them the soldiers brought their pieces up to a salute, and held the
posture rigidly until the second dead man in his yellow box had joined
the company of the first dead man in his.
Just before this happened, though, one of the nurses of the nunnery
hospital did a thing which I shall never forget. She must have seen
that the first coffin had flowers upon it, and in the same instant
realized that the coffin in whose occupant she had a more direct
interest was bare. So she left the straggling line and came running
back. The wall streamed with woodbine, very glorious in its autumnal
flamings. She snatched a trailer of the red and yellow leaves down from
where it clung, and as she hurried back her hands worked with magic
haste, making it into a wreath. She reached the second squad of bearers
and put her wreath upon the lid of the box, and then sought her place
with the other nurses. The guns went up with a snap upon the shoulders
of the company. The soldiers' feet thudded down all together upon the
stones, and with the priest reciting his office the procession passed
out of sight, going toward the burial ground at the back of the town.
Presently, when the shadows were thickening into gloom and the angelus
bells were ringing in the church, I heard, a long way off, the rattle
of the rifles as the soldiers fired good-night volleys over the graves
of their dead comrades.
On the next day, at Hirson, which was another of our stopping points on
the journey to the front, we saw the joint funeral of seven men leaving
the hospital where they had died during the preceding twelve hours,
and I shan't forget that picture either. There was a vista bounded by
a stretch of one of those unutterably bleak backways of a small and
shabby French town. The rutted street twisted along between small gray
plaster houses, with ugly, unnecessary gable-ends, which faced the road
at wrong angles. Small groups of townspeople stood against the walls to
watch. There was also a handful of idling soldiers who watched from
the gateway of the house where they were billeted.
Seven times the bearers entered the hospital door, and each time as
they reappeared, bringing one of the narrow, gaudy, yellow boxes, the
officers lined up at the door would salute and the soldiers in double
lines at the opposite side of the road would present arms, and then, as
the box was lifted upon the wagon waiting to receive it, would smash
their guns down on the bouldered road with a crash. When the job of
bringing forth the dead was done the wagon stood loaded pretty nearly
to capacity. Four of the boxes rested crosswise upon the flat wagon-bed
and the other three were racked lengthwise on top of them. Here, too,
was a priest in his robes, and here were two altar boys who straggled,
so that as the procession started the priest was moved to break off his
chanting long enough to chide his small attendants and wave them back
into proper alignment. With the officers, the nurses and the surgeons
all marching afoot marched also three bearded civilians in frock coats,
having the air about them of village dignitaries. From their presence
in such company we deduced that one of the seven silent travelers on
the wagon must be a French soldier, or else that the Germans had seen
fit to require the attendance of local functionaries at the burial of
dead Germans.
As the cortège--I suppose you might call it that--went by where I
stood with my friends, I saw that upon the sides of the coffins names
were lettered in big, straggly black letters. I read two of the
names--Werner was one, Vogel was the other. Somehow I felt an acuter
personal interest in Vogel and Werner than in the other five whose
names I could not read.
Wherever we stopped in Belgium or in France or in Germany these
soldiers' funerals were things of daily, almost of hourly occurrence.
And in Maubeuge on this evening, even though dusk had fallen, two of
the inevitable yellow boxes, mounted upon a two-wheeled cart, were
going to the burying ground. We figured the cemetery men would fill
the graves by lantern light; and knowing something of their hours
of employment we imagined that with this job disposed of they would
probably turn to and dig graves by night, making them ready against
the needs of the following morning. The new graves always were ready.
They were made in advance, and still there were rarely enough of them,
no matter how long or how hard the diggers kept at their work. At
Aix-la-Chapelle, for example, in the principal cemetery the sexton's
men dug twenty new graves every morning. By evening there would be
twenty shaped mounds of clay where the twenty holes had been. The crop
of the dead was the one sure crop upon which embattled Europe might
count. That harvest could not fail the warring nations, however scanty
other yields might be.
In the towns in occupied territory the cemeteries were the only
actively and constantly busy spots to be found, except the hospitals.
Every schoolhouse was a hospital; indeed I think there can be no
schoolhouse in the zone of actual hostilities that has not served such
a purpose. In their altered aspects we came to know these schoolhouses
mighty well. We would see the wounded going in on stretchers and the
dead coming out in boxes. We would see how the blackboards, still
scrawled over perhaps with the chalked sums of lessons which never were
finished, now bore pasted-on charts dealing in nurses' and surgeons'
cipher-manual, with the bodily plights of the men in the cots and on
the mattresses beneath. We would see classrooms where plaster casts
and globe maps and dusty textbooks had been cast aside in heaps to
make room on desktops and shelves for drugs and bandages and surgical
appliances. We would see the rows of hooks intended originally for the
caps and umbrellas of little people; but now from each hook dangled the
ripped, bloodied garments of a soldier--gray for a German, brown-tan
for an Englishman, blue-and-red for a Frenchman or a Belgian. By the
German rule a wounded man's uniform must be brought back with him from
the place where he fell and kept handily near him, with tags on it, to
prove its proper identity, and there it must stay until its owner needs
it again--if ever he needs it again.
We would see these things, and we would wonder if these schoolhouses
could ever shake off the scents and the stains and the memories of
these present grim visitations--wonder if children would ever frolic
any more in the courtyards where the ambulances stood now with red
drops trickling down from their beds upon the gravel. But that, on our
part, was mere morbidness born of the sights we saw. Children forget
even more quickly than their elders forget, and we knew, from our own
experience, how quickly the populace of a French or Flemish community
could rally back to a colorable counterfeit of their old sprightliness,
once the immediate burdens of affliction and captivity had been lifted
from off them.
From a jumbled confusion of recollection of these schoolhouse-hospitals
sundry incidental pictures stick out in my mind as I write this
article. I can shut my eyes and visualize the German I saw in the
little parish school building in the abandoned hamlet of Colligis near
by the River Aisne. He was in a room with a dozen others, all suffering
from chest wounds. He had been pierced through both lungs with a
bullet, and to keep him from choking to death the attendants had tied
him in a half erect posture. A sort of hammocklike sling passed under
his arms, and a rope ran from it to a hook in a wall and was knotted
fast to the hook. He swung there, neither sitting nor lying, fighting
for the breath of life, with an unspeakable misery looking out from his
eyes; and he was too far spent to lift a hand to brush away the flies
that swarmed upon his face and his lips and upon his bare, throbbing
throat. The flies dappled the faces of his fellow sufferers with
loathsome black dots; they literally masked his.
I preserve a memory which is just as vivid of certain things I saw in a
big institution in Laon. Although in German hands, and nominally under
German control, the building was given over entirely to crippled and
ailing French prisoners. These patients were minded and fed by their
own people and attended by captured French surgeons. In our tour of the
place I saw only two men wearing the German gray. One was the armed
sentry who stood at the gate to see that no recovering inmate slipped
out, and the other was a German surgeon-general who was making his
daily round of inspection of the hospitals and had brought us along
with him. Of the native contingent the person who appeared to be in
direct charge was a handsome, elderly lady, tenderly solicitous of the
frowziest Turco in the wards and exquisitely polite, with a frozen
politeness, to the German officer. When he saluted her she bowed to
him deeply and ceremoniously and silently. I never thought until then
that a bow could be so profoundly executed and yet so icily cold. It
was a lesson in congealed manners.
As we were leaving the room a nun serving as a nurse hailed the German
and told him one of her charges was threatening to die, not because of
his wound, but because he had lost heart and believed himself to be
dying.
"Where is he?" asked the German.
"Yonder," she said, indicating a bundled-up figure on a pallet near the
door. A drawn, hopeless face of a half-grown boy showed from the huddle
of blankets. The surgeon-general cast a quick look at the swathed form
and then spoke in an undertone to a French regimental surgeon on duty
in the room. Together the two approached the lad.
"My son," said the German to him in French, "I am told you do not feel
so well to-day."
The boy-soldier whispered an answer and waggled his head despondently.
The German put his hand on the youth's forehead.
"My son," he said, "listen to me. You are not going to die--I promise
you that you shall not die. My colleague here"--he indicated the
French doctor--"stands ready to make you the same promise. If you
won't believe a German, surely you will take your own countryman's
professional word for it," and he smiled a little smile under his gray
mustache. "Between us we are going to make you well and send you, when
this war is over, back to your mother. But you must help us; you must
help us by being brave and confident. Is it not so, doctor?" he added,
again addressing the French physician, and the Frenchman nodded to show
it was so and sat down alongside the youngster to comfort him further.
As we left the room the German surgeon turned, and looking round I
saw that once again he saluted the patrician French lady, and this
time as she bowed the ice was all melted from her bearing. She must
have witnessed the little byplay; perhaps she had a son of her own in
service. There were mighty few mothers in France last fall who did not
have sons in service.
Yet one of the few really humorous recollections of this war that
I preserve had to do with a hospital too; but this hospital was in
England and we visited it on our way home to America. We went--two of
us--in the company of Lord Northcliffe, down into Surrey, to spend a
day with old Lord Roberts. Within three weeks thereafter Lord Roberts
was dead where no doubt he would have willed to die--at the front in
France, with the sound of the guns in his ears, guarded in his last
moments by the Ghurkas and the Sikhs of his beloved Indian contingent.
But on this day of our visit to him we found him a hale, kindly
gentleman of eighty-two who showed us his marvelous collection of
firearms and Oriental relics and the field guns, all historic guns by
the way, which he kept upon the terraces of his mansion house, and who
told us, among other things, that in his opinion our own Stonewall
Jackson was perhaps the greatest natural military genius the world
had ever produced. Leaving his house we stopped, on our return to
London, at a hospital for soldiers in the grounds of Ascot Race Course
scarcely two miles from Lord Roberts' place. The refreshment booths and
the other rooms at the back and underside of the five-shilling stand
had been thrown together, except the barber's shop, which was being
converted into an operating chamber; and, what with its tiled walls
and high sloped ceiling and glass front, the place made a first-rate
hospital.
It contained beds for fifty men; but on this day there were less than
twenty sick and crippled Tommies convalescing here. They had been
brought out of France, out of wet and cold and filth, with hurried
dressings on their hurts; and now they were in this bright, sweet,
wholesome place, with soft beds under them and clean linen on their
bodies, and flowers and dainties on the tables that stood alongside
them, and the gentlefolk of the neighborhood to mind them as volunteer
nurses.
There were professional nurses, of course; but, under them, the
younger women of the wealthy families of this corner of Surrey were
serving; and mighty pretty they all looked, too, in their crisp
blue-and-white uniforms, with their arm badges and their caps, and
their big aprons buttoned round their slim, athletic young bodies. I
judge there were about three amateur nurses to each patient. Yet you
could not rightly call them amateurs either; each of them had taken a
short course in nursing, it seemed, and was amply competent to perform
many of the duties a regular nurse must know.
Lady Aileen Roberts was with us during our tour of the hospital. As a
daily visitor and patroness she spent much of her time here and she
knew most of the inmates by name. She halted alongside one bed to ask
its occupant how he felt. He had been returned from the front suffering
from pneumonia.
He was an Irishman. Before he answered her he cast a quick look about
the long hall. Afternoon tea was just being served, consisting, besides
tea, of homemade strawberry jam and lettuce sandwiches made of crisp
fresh bread, with plenty of butter; and certain elderly ladies had just
arrived, bringing with them, among other contributions, sheaves of
flowers and a dogcart loaded with hothouse fruit and a dozen loaves of
plumcake, which last were still hot from the oven and which radiated a
mouth-watering aroma as a footman bore them in behind his mistress. The
patient looked at all these and he sniffed; and a grin split his face
and an Irish twinkle came into his eyes.
"Thank you, me lady, for askin'," he said; "but I'm very much afeared
I'm gettin' better."
We might safely assume that the hospitals and the graveyard of Maubeuge
would be busy places that evening, thereby offering strong contrasts
to the rest of the town. But I should add that we found two other busy
spots, too: the railroad station--where the trains bringing wounded
men continually shuttled past--and the house where the commandant of
the garrison had his headquarters. In the latter place, as guests of
Major von Abercron, we met at dinner that night and again after dinner
a strangely mixed company. We met many officers and the pretty American
wife of an officer, Frau Elsie von Heinrich, late of Jersey City, who
had made an adventurous trip in a motor ambulance from Germany to see
her husband before he went to the front, and who sent regards by us
to scores of people in her old home whose names I have forgotten. We
met also a civilian guest of the commandant, who introduced himself as
August Blankhertz and who turned out to be a distinguished big-game
hunter and gentleman aëronaut. With Major von Abercron for a mate he
sailed from St. Louis in the great balloon race for the James Gordon
Bennett Cup. They came down in the Canadian woods and nearly died of
hunger and exposure before they found a lumber camp. Their balloon
was called the Germania. There was another civilian, a member of the
German secret-service staff, wearing the Norfolk jacket and the green
Alpine hat and on a cord about his neck the big gold token of authority
which invariably mark a representative of this branch of the German
espionage bureau; and he was wearing likewise that transparent air of
mystery which seemed always to go with the followers of his ingenious
profession.
During the evening the mayor of Maubeuge came, a bearded, melancholy
gentleman, to confer with the commandant regarding a clash between a
German under-officer and a household of his constituents. Orderlies and
attendants bustled in and out, and somebody played Viennese waltz songs
on a piano, and altogether there was quite a gay little party in the
parlor of this handsome house which the Germans had commandeered for
the use of their garrison staff.
At early bedtime, when we stepped out of the door of the lit-up mansion
into the street, it was as though we had stepped into a far-off
country. Except for the tramp of a sentry's hobbed boots over the
sidewalks and the challenging call of another sentry round the corner
the town was as silent as a town of tombs. All the people who remained
in this place had closed their forlorn shops where barren shelves and
emptied showcases testified to the state of trade; and they had shut
themselves up in their houses away from sight of the invaders. We could
guess what their thoughts must be. Their industries were paralyzed, and
their liberties were curtailed, and every other house was a breached
and worthless shell. Among ourselves we debated as we walked along to
the squalid tavern where we had been quartered, which of the spectacles
we had that day seen most fitly typified the fruitage of war--the
shattered, haunted forts lying now in the moonlight beyond the town, or
the brooding conquered, half-destroyed town itself.
I guess, if it comes to that, they both typified it.